Zeuglodon

by James P. Blaylock

  The Grand Banks are of course not the sort of banks where you put your money, but are a shallow, rocky shelf that rises near the surface of the ocean. They stretch almost three hundred miles off Newfoundland into the Atlantic. Sometimes in the winter entire icebergs float down out of the Arctic Sea and run aground on the Banks and get stuck and just sit there melting and melting. It’s a part of the ocean known for strange things occurring, and you can be sure that I kept my camera in my pocket.

  During the 1870s giant squids fifty feet long and with suckers as big around as car tires came up out of deep water by the dozen and washed ashore in Newfoundland, although no one knows why, and then after a time they stopped washing ashore, and nothing like that has ever happened again, at least not with giant squids. That was called “the Newfoundland groundings.” Maybe some day there will be giant squids off Caspar, although I hope they don’t ground themselves, because a live squid is so very much better than a dead one, which is true of almost everything.

  So that’s where we found ourselves, on board the S.S. Clematis, sailing out of St. John’s, Newfoundland, under Captain William Sodbury, whom Uncle Hedge sailed with in the old days, when they were young. The ship is an old Merchant Marine vessel, but small—only about thirty meters, which didn’t seem all that small to me. According to Uncle Hedge it was “overhauled” and has powerful magnet-drive Helmoltz engines based on a design by Roycroft Squires, who was an engineer in Los Angeles back in the 1950s. The Guild of St. George bought his patents and rebuilt the Clematis, which looks like an old Merchant Marine vessel on the outside, and sounds like one, too, but that’s really just a disguise, what Uncle Hedge calls “window dressing.” I wanted to take photographs of the engines and other interesting things for my science project, but they were top secret, and so I couldn’t.

  The Clematis has three decks: the boat deck, the cabin deck or ’tween deck, and what’s called the below-deck. We were on the cabin deck, which has thirteen staterooms for passengers on account of there being thirteen members of the Guild of St. George, so we each had one of our own. They were small and snug, with porthole windows and just enough cupboard space to stow your gear. There’s a saloon on the cabin deck, too, and the galley and the library and the chart room, which is hung with maps of the coasts and seas of the world, and with hundreds more charts and maps in wooden drawers. The Clematis travels all over the watery deep, you see, on scientific expeditions and doing the bidding of the Guild.

  Perry and I had very little to do on the voyage, being mostly caught up with our work at school. I took pictures of the fog, and pictures of not-fog, but they weren’t interesting. There were books in the library, though, and I spent hours reading by the misty light coming in through the porthole. Lots of times I would stop reading and just look at things and get lost in my own thoughts. The walls were paneled with dark wood, and there were brass fittings and fixtures and Turkish carpets of rich colors. There were paintings of sailing ships on the walls, tossing on the high seas, and a portrait of Admiral Nelson and another one of Sir Francis Drake. The Mermaid sat on the wooden library table, which was carved around the edges with the figures of South Seas fishes, and sometimes I had the strangest feeling that she was about to speak to me, to tell me secret things about the world beneath our ship. She kept silent, though.

  When we were off the Grand Banks themselves, the sound of fog horns was frequent, and there was the ringing of ships’ bells, and the Clematis moved slowly in order not to collide with anything, either ships or out-of-the-way icebergs, which I wanted very much to see in order to take photos of something solid. But there was still too much fog, really, to see anything. How we were going to find a submarine that was the color of the fog itself was a question worth pondering, but Uncle Hedge said that we didn’t have to find it, really. We were waiting to be contacted on the shipboard sub-lunar. Dr. Frosticos would give us coordinates and instructions. In the meantime we were simply biding our time.

  As a science project, Brendan undertook an experiment with fog. Uncle Hedge told him that he must follow the scientific method, with a hypothesis, and that he must prove or disprove the hypothesis in the end, because a paper without a conclusion isn’t a paper at all. Brendan’s hypothesis, which wasn’t much of a one, was that fog vanished when you put it into a jar, and so fog wasn’t really anything at all but was an illusion. He went and begged six jars with lids from the steward, old Charlie Slimmerman, who only eats half of anything on his plate, which is why he’s slim. His real last name is Panguitch, but he doesn’t use it because it reminds him of food. Brendan took the jars out to the bow of the ship and “caught” the fog in them and screwed on the tops, just like the jar with Edison’s last breath in it, and sure enough, when he brought the bottles back inside they appeared to be empty.

  He wrote his paper in about ten minutes and said his hypothesis was proved, and that fog was imaginary. Uncle Hedge said that his paper was a travesty and must be at least four pages long and have a sensible method in order to have a sensible result. So Perry and I kindly said we would help him do the experiment over again. We took the jars back out onto the deck, and we all worked to fill them with the bellows from the library fireplace, sucking up fog with the bellows and then shooting it into the jars through a hole in a piece of plastic wrap stretched over the top. We screwed the lids down as soon as we pulled the bellows out of the jars, but somehow all the fog escaped no matter how quick we were, and the jars remained empty.

  “I’ve got it!” Brendan said finally. “Fog isn’t imaginary, but just moves really fast, like light. How fast does light go?”

  “Two point six zillion miles an hour,” Perry told him. “In one light year it can reach the solar plexus, maybe farther.”

  “Then my hypothesis is that fog moves at the speed of two point six zillion miles an hour,” Brendan said, “and that it won’t stand to be in a jar. It’s like a genie in a lamp. It escapes at the first chance, so fast that you can’t even see. You measure it in fog years.”

  “Is that like dog years?” Perry asked.

  “Much faster,” Brendan said haughtily.

  “There’s your title,” Perry said helpfully, “‘Faster than a dog year.’”

  “There’s your brain, you mean,” Brendan said.

  “And your hypothesis is stupid as a stick.”

  “Did you see the fog inside the jar?” Brendan asked him.

  “No. But I didn’t see a dinosaur inside the jar either. Was there one of those, too, but it jumped out really fast?”

  “Talk about stupid as a stick,” Brendan said. “Who said anything about dinosaurs?”

  “He means you can’t just keep changing your hypothesis when the experiment doesn’t work,” I told him sensibly. “That’s backwards science.”

  “Who made you the queen of the world?” Brendan asked nastily. “Talk about backwards. And anyway, my way is more righter than yours, because whatever happens becomes the hypothesis. That’s how Newton invented gravity. The apple hit him in the head, and that’s when he knew about it. And the same with what’s-his-name—that man in the bathtub who sloshed out all the water on the floor and then figured out it was because he was too fat.”

  “Archimedes,” I said. “And he wasn’t a fat man.”

  “How do you know? Were you there? I think he was a fat man, and I think that he should have put less water in the bathtub. I could have told him that much, the scum-pig moron.”

  “Archimedes wasn’t a moron,” I said calmly. “And Newton didn’t invent gravity. And the apple didn’t hit him in the head anyway.”

  But Brendan wouldn’t listen. He said that he was the scientist, in case we’d forgotten, and that we were just Igor, and we were as ugly as Igor, too, and as stupid as Archimedes. Perry said that Brendan could jolly well be the scientist, then, because he was going off to the library to read a book, and that he could hardly wait to hear what Uncle Hedge would have to say about Brendan’s brilliant hypothesis.

 
Brendan told me that I was “dismissed,” and so I left, too. I walked toward the bow, feeling lazy and bored and just looking out at the fog and thinking about Newton and gravity and whether it would be funny if it had been a fig instead of an apple, which made me realize I was hungry. So I decided to look in on the galley to beg an apple from Wise Norton, the ship’s pegleg cook, who would be putting together lunch. I heard voices ahead just then, but the fog was so thick that I didn’t see anyone, although they must be close by. I could smell pipe smoke, too, so it was Captain Sodbury, or at least one of them was.

  I stopped, not really meaning to eavesdrop, but not moving along, either, and once the talking got going again, I stayed to listen.

  “I never gave this talk about the Sleeper much credence,” the Captain said. “It sounds like nonsense to me. Tolerably unlikely.”

  “I’ve seen old Cardigan Peach at work”—it was Uncle Hedge now—“and I came to believe things that I wouldn’t admit in public, if you know what I mean. There’s no room for it in science, what I saw.”

  “I’ve seen such things myself,” Captain Sodbury said. “In ’62, when I was first apprenticed to the Guild, I was ship’s boy on the old Wisteria, down along the coast of Brazil. We put out a boat one midnight to pick up a man on a beach right there at the mouth of the Amazon, on one of those islands off Marajo. The man was Basil Peach, although the name meant nothing to me at the time. I was keyed up, you know, because the Captain told us there was some danger from interlopers. It was dark, too, and unless the man had a light and could show us a glim, there wasn’t much hope of us finding him. There’s a hundred miles of shoreline there.”

  “But you found Peach?”

  “Aye, we found him. It was me who saw him. There were clouds, you see, with the crescent moon showing through now and again, but mostly black as pitch, and you couldn’t tell the beach from the ocean. Then out comes the moon, looking like the cat’s smile, only it seems to me to be falling right down out of the sky, like it’ll land in the ocean, and by and by I could see the clouds behind it. The tropical air can play some tricks on you, but this beat all.

  “So everyone was looking at the sky, you see, with the moon dropping straight toward us like it was hung with lead weights. I took a squint at the shore, and the moonlight looked like half a ring of witchfire where it was reflected on the sand, although it was dark beyond. There stood Basil Peach in the midst of it, wearing that hat of his and glowing with moonlight. I sung out, and we headed in toward shore, and the moon hung there spanning half the sky until we run the boat up onto the sand and Peach was safe. Then away it went, back up into its rightful orbit, and the clouds covered it, and we pushed off and back to the ship in the darkness with no one saying much of anything but everyone thinking the same way. Like you said, there was nothing natural in it. I didn’t know Peach from an apricot, but I when I saw the man up close there in the boat I knew he’d done it himself. He drew the moon out of the sky like a lantern when he had a need of it.”

  I thought about what we had seen at the sea cave, and I knew the Captain was right. Lala Peach could do it, too, or something like it.

  “This Sleeper business is a different kettle of fish, though,” Captain Sodbury said. “I can understand what they call ‘mind projection.’ But the idea that the rest of us can…participate in it—that’s too many for me.”

  “And yet there’s evidence of it,” Uncle Hedge said.

  “Stories, maybe. I haven’t seen what you’d call evidence.”

  “Stories that convinced the Doctor, right enough. Otherwise he wouldn’t be out here holding Lala Peach for ransom. What I want to know is what he intends to do. He’s got his eye on getting through the Windermere Passage while Giles Peach is asleep and dreaming, but Peach will wake up, and then what?”

  “That’s beyond my ken,” the Captain said. “The spring tide is five days away. There’s always a spring tide in this business of the Sleeper, or so they say.”

  “That’s why Frosticos is in such a tearing hurry,” Uncle Hedge said. “It makes him a dangerous man. He knows something that we don’t about all this, but what is it? What’s his game?”

  “Maybe he aims to get in through the Passage and back out again before Peach wakes up and closes it down. There’s something Frosticos wants to bring out, I’d say.”

  “So I thought. But I’m starting to think there’s more. Whatever he’s aiming to do, it frightened Lala into coming out to Fort Bragg to get hold of the key. She was in the same kind of hurry. We know that now. If the Doctor was after a bucketful of diamonds, why would she care about what he did? It’s no loss to her. To my mind she means to put a stop to something more sinister than anything you can carry in a bucket, and she means to do it alone. She doesn’t trust anyone outside the family.”

  It was right then that the Clematis sailed out of the fog and into one of those clear spaces that I told you about, and my iceberg wish came true. Lying a quarter mile off the starboard bow was a floating ice island. The ice was blue along the edges, a deep aqua blue like the color of the Zeuglodon. I guess you could call it an iceberg, except that it had a long, low area along one edge, like a beach, and so it looked more like an island than like a berg. “There she blows,” Captain Sodbury said, and Uncle Hedge said, “I guess it’s time.” They were standing ten feet from me, but the fog had been so thick a minute ago that we’d all been invisible.

  I watched the nearby ocean for the appearance of a submarine, but there was no submarine to be seen. The ship’s engines fell off, and we ghosted along for a moment and then stopped dead still. The anchors rattled down and quickly found the bottom, because as I said, it’s shallow in those seas. I took pictures of the island and of the small waves breaking along the beach, and Uncle Hedge watched the island through binoculars. Hasbro prowled up and down, sniffing the cold air, as if he knew something was about to happen, and Brendan and Perry came on deck. Perry said, “Crikey,” but Brendan said nothing at all.

  Rising above the beach were steep ice cliffs, one behind the other, with a dark valley in between two of the highest. As we watched, an enormous long chunk of ice broke away along the farther edge of the island and fell crashing into the sea, sending up a plume of water and a wave that ran out away from the island and soon passed beneath us. I was anxious to go across and actually walk on the ice myself, which Uncle Hedge had said we might do if he thought it was safe.

  “Look there!” Perry said suddenly, just as a man walked out from within the shadows of the ice valley. He was curiously dressed, but it wasn’t until Uncle Hedge handed me the binoculars that I could make any sense out of his strange garb, and even then it was hard to believe. Over his head he wore a diver’s helmet made out of what looked like an enormous spiral seashell, and the sunlight glanced off its circular glass faceplate. There were two hoses spiraling away over his shoulders, connected to a cylinder suspended in front of his stomach by a strap that went around his neck. He was dressed in a baggy pair of pantaloons with a long overcoat with a fur collar.

  “It’s Reginald Peach,” Uncle Hedge said in a low voice. “Back from the dead. I’ll be dipped in a sack of dung.”

  Chapter 11

  The Ice Island

  “Aye, it’s Reginald,” Captain Sodbury said. “It appears that he’s gone over to the other side.”

  Uncle Hedge shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said. “There’s always been bad blood between him and Basil, but he wouldn’t harm Lala. She’s his grand niece after all. It’s a mystery what he’s doing here, but either we’ll know the truth soon enough, or we’ll be homeward bound and it won’t matter.”

  Uncle Hedge turned around and went back into the ship, heading down the companionway in the direction of the chart room, and when he returned he was carrying the lead-encased box with the journal maps inside. As he walked he slipped them into a canvas bag on a strap and hung it around his neck. Like I said, if things went bad, and we were betrayed, the lead box was meant to carry
the maps to the bottom of the sea. But if Frosticos kept his word, and handed over Lala, then Uncle Hedge was to give him the box, and just like that Frosticos would have won. What we would do then, or what Lala would do, I didn’t know. There was the matter of the key, also, and I wondered whether they would have any idea by now that Lala possessed it. Uncle Hedge would have to tell them, of course, to keep up his side of the bargain, and then they’d have to take it away from Lala. What a mess, I thought.

  Charlie Slimmerman handed us each a pair of strap-on ice cleats—attachable shoe soles with spikes sticking through for walking on ice. He told us not to put them on yet, because we didn’t want to punch holes in the bottom of the boat, which was an inflatable. He also gave us a big tin box with a lunch inside, and then he and Captain Sodbury lowered the inflatable into the water and put down the ladder. The four of us were going across, while Charlie, the Captain, Wise Norton, and Hasbro stayed behind.

  We climbed down into the inflatable and I started the outboard motor (which is one of things I’m good at, because my mother taught me) and all the time I was afraid that Uncle Hedge would change his mind and decide that it was too dangerous for us, but he didn’t. We were to stay well back, he told us, and under no circumstances were we to come anywhere near the negotiations, which shouldn’t take more than sixty seconds, because he intended to keep his word and hand over the maps. If anything “went south” as he put it, we were to head straight back to the ship in the inflatable, even if it meant leaving him behind.

  I steered us toward the distant beach, very carefully and slowly, too, so that we didn’t ship any water. A few yards off, I cut the power, and we cocked the engine forward so that the propeller wouldn’t get damaged beating against the ice. The inflatable slid up onto the ice shelf, riding a small wave, and we climbed out, putting on our ice cleats and crunching up the beach toward the man in the seashell helmet.